Material presented on The American Mafia history website (http://mafiahistory.us and http://www.onewal.com/) was gathered through decades of research into the history of American organized crime. A childhood interest in the subject blossomed into a full-time obsession in the late 1990s, when I began organizing collected newspaper clippings, notebook pages and index cards. That effort gave rise to this website in September 2002. The website is more of a process than it is a document. Very often new historical data becomes available and causes old assumptions to be revised or abandoned. Over the past few years, many underworld legends appearing on these pages have given way to more defensible statements. And other revisions are sure to be made in the months and years ahead. It is a pleasure to be able to share my interest with you. I welcome your emailed comments, questions, criticisms. I hope that the site is useful to you and that you check in from time to time to see what is new. Copyright © 2011, Thomas Hunt. All rights reserved.




Monday, December 13, 2010

Cicale testimony added to site

We are indebted to Justin Dugard for purchasing, editing and contributing to The American Mafia website the October 14, 2008, federal court testimony of Stefan Cicale. Cicale was the government's key witness in the racketeering/murder trial of Bonanno Crime Family associate Joseph Young.

Cicale's direct examination testimony is broken up into three web pages for ease of use. A subject index will be added in the near future.

Joseph Young was convicted of the gruesome 2005 murder of Robert McElvey at the historic - and allegedly haunted - Kreischer Mansion on Staten Island (see photo). Cicale was charged as an accomplice and decided to cooperate with federal investigators.

The testimony can be accessed through the website's Articles menu or through this direct address:
http://www.onewal.com/a020/f_young.html

Update begins gradually

Visitors to The American Mafia website may begin to notice changes to certain pages. These are part of the overall site update. Various revised pages are now taking their places on the site. Some aspects of these pages - typestyles and formatting - may not look just right yet. The site's "stylesheet," which deals with these aspects, will be the final element to be brought online. This is necessary so that the older pages remain readable.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Lots to update

I hope visitors are not despairing over the wait for the website redesign. There is much to do.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Hinchey report on OC in waste hauling

I've found some time to add significantly to the online presentation of a New York State report on Organized Crime in the Waste Hauling Industry. The online pages can be found through the Gov't Sources menu selection. They can also be accessed directly using this web address: http://www.onewal.com/maf-hinc.html

I hope to be able to add more pages in the very near future.

The website redesign, by the way, continues ... slowly.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

New site navigation

As part of the redesign, The American Mafia history website (www.onewal.com) will be eliminating its extensive vertical menu. The menu will be replaced with a page-top horizontal navigation bar for most visitors. The bar contains several submenus and brings pages up in a lower frame.



Top menu selections for Home, Places and Forum will be clickable. Moving the cursor over selections for Site (shown above), Articles, People, Timeline, Media and Sources will cause a small submenu to pop up with between three and six selections in each one. (The navigation bar contains no sub-submenus.)

In addition, each content page will contain a box with small plain-text links to site contents. Those without frames-capable browsers will see only this box (below).


The goal here is to keep all navigation options available at all times, while keeping them out of the way of the main body content.

Launching this blog

I've started this blog in an effort to keep visitors informed of behind-the-scenes happenings on The American Mafia history website (www.onewal.com). At this moment, the website is undergoing another redesign. My hope is to be able to present you a more streamlined and usable site in the very near future.

If you have any ideas for how the site could be made more useful or "friendly," please feel free to share those ideas with me. Email messages can be sent to thunt@onewal.com. You can also find me on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/tphunt).